


start all over and win again

by philthestone



Series: start all over and win again [2]
Category: Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), plot is a social construct
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 17:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14815604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: “You’ve fought before,” he says, a statement. “You’re a fighter.”The woman swallows, and looks back down at the holographs spread on the table, Shuri’s dedicated calculations, picking the enemy’s weapon apart.“Yes.”“You’re here to fight.”He doesn’t think that this is a question, either. There is a flicker in her expression, the ghost of something vindictive and hard, the shadow of crumpling emotion.“I’m here to find my family,” she says.Steve understands.





	start all over and win again

**Author's Note:**

> takes place as a sort of prequel to "what do you need, a secondhand movie star to tend you" -- so, at an indiscernible point in Avengers 4. obviously, if you haven't seen infinity war yet, there are spoilers ahead. there isn't really a clear defined plot, but. we're just rolling with it, babey
> 
> title is from marvin gaye's troubleman theme, and reviews are that sweet sweet iconic romance reunion content that we all deserve

Steve wonders if you can experience the end of the world one too many times.

If there’s -- a limit, or something. A finite number of times you can really watch everything you care about go up in flames. A definite end to the list of Aftermaths, the times you have to pick up the pieces and fix things after the fact.

And it’s not even a true after the fact, this time; the threat is still out there.

The world could still end again.

“Got word from the  _ Benatar _ .” He waits for Steve to look up. “Looks like they found help.”

“Found help,” Steve repeats, the straps of his gloves digging into his wrists as he rests his weight on his hands against the big oval table set in the middle of Shuri’s lab. The war room, T’Challa had taken to calling it with a flicker of an old glint in his eye. There’s a gentility to the young king that’s lingered even through being brought back from the proverbial dead. Steve wishes that he had been able to do that, when it was him.

Steve wishes that this was a war he knew how to fight.

Bucky grimaces -- or rather, makes a face that implies a grimace, and shrugs with one shoulder. “Maybe the help found them. Call Stark.”

Steve nods, and looks back down at the map they have pulled up. He can do maps. He can handle a sudden and unexplained reversal of universe-altering devastation. He can do -- something.

He’s not sure what. 

“I’ll call him,” Steve promises, compelled to look back up, eyes wide with a panicky impulse that comes out of nowhere -- a sudden and nauseating need to make sure that Bucky is still standing in front of him. There’s a flicker in his friend’s expression, as though he can read the change in Steve’s eyes; instead of leaving the room to go check on supplies, he sets down his gun, rounds the table and settles to Steve’s left.

Steve inhales, and thinks that even if he doesn’t know how to fight it, this is going to be a war that they win. 

It has to be.

**

She shows up one day amidst the rest of the panicky survivors and restored loved ones. A woman: reticent, and clearly not of Earth, but somehow more assured in her movements and few words than Steve feels after two weeks of plans and re-grouping and reunions, of pretending to be a leader among many. He doesn’t give her much thought initially, aside from her decidedly alien looks, and even that is an afterthought -- they’ve received more than one distress call, in the weeks since, and not just from neighboring countries. On the third day after she appears, he finds her in the war room, examining their schematics.

He finds he doesn’t have the energy to ask her to leave. It’s hard to believe that there would be anyone out there who might align themselves with the enemy, at this point. And this woman -- Steve has an odd feeling.

“The stones --” Her voice sounds raspy, whether a natural characteristic or from disuse Steve can’t tell. “You shouldn’t be so focused on the soul gem.”

“It’s the most powerful,” Steve says, and feels foolish even as he does. This isn’t his expertise -- never was, never has been. He’s seen more than his fair share of what might be called fantastical, and he takes it as it comes. But he’d much rather this woman argue the finer points with Princess Shuri, or even Tony, than himself.

“No. It requires sacrifice.”

Steve almost scoffs at that;  _ sacrifice _ . She seems to pick up on his near-reaction, and her eyes flick up, narrowing. Her hair is bright, colourful, contrasting sharply against her dark leathers and dirtied undershirt. He wonders if she’s thought to find new clothes since she arrived, but doesn’t ask; it doesn’t seem important, somehow.

“It’s just not a word that means a whole lot to me anymore,” Steve says, feeling compelled to explain himself for a reason he can’t name. He shifts his weight to one foot, and loops his fingers through his belt. And it  _ doesn’t _ , really. Words lose meaning when they’re beaten to death over and over in a life that’s near a whole century too long.

She tilts her head, regarding him. Behind the exhaustion written all over her face, there’s a sharpness and perception that Steve knows; it’s calculating, measured, tactical. The colours in her hair shift in the purple lights of Shuri’s lab, changeable.

“You’ve fought before,” he says, a statement. “You’re a fighter.”

The woman swallows, and looks back down at the holographs spread on the table, Shuri’s dedicated calculations, picking the enemy’s weapon apart.

“Yes.”

“You’re here to fight.”

He doesn’t think that this is a question, either. There is a flicker in her expression, the ghost of something vindictive and hard, the shadow of crumpling emotion.

“I’m here to find my family,” she says.

Steve understands.

**

She never asks for new clothes.

He sees her, around the compound, occasionally in the back of the war room when there are enough people there for her to blend in. He’d called her a fighter -- a warrior, the Wakandans would say -- but she doesn’t have any weapons strapped to her belt, and she moves quietly, ridgid yet fluid at once in her steps. He’s sure that were it not for a trained eye and a perpetually wary disposition, he would miss her at the back of the lab more often than not. 

He doesn’t call her out.

They’re just waiting, for now -- nothing more to do, until the  _ Benatar _ party comes back with more allies, with the last part of their plan. The half of their plan that made the plan possible, because Steve still isn’t sure how everyone came back. Still can’t let Sam or Bucky out of his sight for more than five minutes at a time, which is perhaps not the healthiest habit he’s ever developed.

“We’re all fuckin’ screw-ups anyway,” Bucky says, to Steve’s apology. “C’mon. It’s the end of the world.”

Steve can’t bring himself to defend himself; he’s seen the princess attached to her brother’s hip even as they soldier through this half-world aftermath; he’s watched families reunite across the grounds, watched Tony struggle through the decision of taking Parker with him on their recon mission, torn between letting the kid out of his sight and putting him back in danger.

Most everyone else who left is still missing people. Thor has been unnaturally quiet since the Snap, and the rag-tag group of self-proclaimed Guardians left with him and Tony and the kid in tow, weighed down and unmoored by a loss Steve still doesn’t know much about. The robot girl -- Nebula -- went off on her own the third day after she landed, and he hasn’t seen her since. Strange, too, has disappeared, and Steve has stopped trying to make sense of his friends’ -- friends? -- decisions. Trust is a strange thing, at the end of the world.

Wanda has stayed. She doesn’t say much, and helps how she can.

He wonders why the woman came to Earth to look for her family, but doesn’t bring it up. He has so much else on his mind, after all, and has neither the time nor the energy to seek out a woman he doesn’t know and by all accounts shouldn’t trust so immediately, in the midst of the chaos they’re trapped within, to have friendly conversation.

He’s seen her with some of the refugees, though -- the displaced families that have found safety or each other through some of Wakanda’s ground responses. There’s a hub in New York, too, he knows -- Nat scouted it out, in the early days, just to make sure that the chaos was being somehow managed. And one in London, another in Cairo, and Hong Kong -- all over the place, a strange mix of military and UN and local heroes, super or not. But he’s seen her -- quiet, stiff, but there, directing people to the right places for help and support, offering soft-spoken reassurances to children.

He wonders, at that -- at the fact that this unfamiliar woman is better at this than he is. He’s gotten his family back, after all, and he’s still struggling. As far as Steve knows, she still hasn’t found hers. But she’s here.

He wonders, too, at his inclination to trust her. 

There’s a moment, a half-second, that Bucky sees her, and something shifts in his eyes. Steve wonders if maybe that’s where his trust comes from.

“That’s a stupid reason to trust someone,” Bucky says, and he’s damn right. Steve can only bring himself to smile, exhausted, not meeting his eyes.

**

“You seem to know a lot about these,” Steve says, the fourth time he finds her examining the holos of the stones. Shuri is there with her, and Shuri seems to be completely at ease in her presence, so Steve pushes the instinctive yet blunted suspicions at her motives to the back of his mind. Her eyes are narrowed again; prior to the announcement of his presence, she had seemed uniquely at ease in a way that he hasn’t seen from her before. He wonders if it is because Shuri is still a child in all the ways that count, and thinks again to how easily she had seemed to push aside the brittleness he read so quickly on her to speak to the children scattered through the chaos surrounding them.

“I’m trying to help.”

“Thank you,” he says, and finds that he really means it. This seems to disarm her, if only momentarily. 

She opens her mouth, like she wants to speak, but doesn’t, looking at him for a moment longer before turning back to the holographs. There’s a weight to the way she carries herself, he’s noticed; a pressure on the impeccable posture that’s drilled into her, dragging it down even as she keeps it upright. Wearied by the passage of time but still stubbornly present, steel-backed. Her clothes have been cleaned, he notices, but not changed; she reminds him a little of Nat, holding onto a familiar type of armor to maintain control over everything else.

Nat’s isn’t clothes, Steve thinks, not on most days. He wonders if this woman’s also isn’t clothes, if she’s resorted to this particular armor out of necessity only.

“There’s a relationship,” says Shuri suddenly, declarative and filled with still-childlike excitement at a discovery. Her big eyes have widened to a bigger size, and she taps her dashboard twice, reconfiguring the images in front of them. “The gems are all connected.”

“Yes,” says the woman, voice quiet. She looks back up, first at Shuri and then at Steve.

“A relationship?”

“A network,” says Shuri, tapping furiously at her notes. “A system, but it is not quite organic.”

The woman says nothing, hands falling tense but limp at the table in front of her. Like she knew this all along.

“To disrupt the system would require great amounts of force,” says the princess, shaking her head in a fashion Steve’s come to learn is characteristic, a small reminder of her natural exuberance. “But we  _ could _ do it. I will talk with my brother.” She looks up, and smiles at her two companions.

“I have complete faith,” says Steve, “that if anyone could figure it out, it’d be you, your highness.”

Shuri’s smile widens, glowing at reassurance Steve knows she would have never wanted nor needed before. Something in his chest aches. He should go find Bucky, soon, and Sam as well. He’s certain that give another few minutes Shuri will be slipping out of her beloved lab to go find T’Challa, the urgency of the statement  _ I will talk with my brother _ more than just technical.

From Shuri’s side, the other woman smiles too, a very slight, small thing. It doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

“You came here,” he finds himself saying suddenly. “Why?”

Her clenched jaw holds her back momentarily. Shuri pauses, looks between the two of them curiously. 

“My ship’s tracker broke on my way to Terra,” she says. “It was my last reasonable landing.”

“So your family,” says Steve. The lab is filled with glowing purple light that leaves him wrong-footed in a way that the natural lighting of the throne room, or the open halls of the palace, or the steps to the marketplace or the field do not. “You haven’t -- found them.”

Her face is tight, but not upset. Just -- tired.

“I told you I could help locate them, _usisi_ Gamora,” comes Shuri’s voice, eager and declarative once more. Stubbornly determined. Speaking to a friend, adopted wholeheartedly here at the end of the world. Steve would smile if not for everything.

“Thank you, your highness,” says the woman,  _ Gamora _ , and Steve struggles to identify why there is a familiarity to it. “But it’s fine.”

She says it like an explanation. Steve wonders again at how she seems to know more than him and yet also looks lost, displaced in a way he keeps trying to parse.

Like she’s waiting, too, just as they are. 

**

“Nearly back,” says Tony’s voice, through the screen. He looks exhausted, Steve thinks, but then they all do. Every single one. The kids just look scared. “Danvers, Carol. You should look her up, she’s an ex-army chick. Probably get along like a boot camp on fire.”

“Hilarious,” says Steve, and rubs at his beard. He’s in desperate need of a shave, but time -- time is weird, nowadays. “How are you holdin’ up?”

“The truth? Been better,” Tony sniffs and glances at something off screen, then leans back, rubs at his arm. Steve clenches his jaw, then releases it. The holopad is too light in his hands. “Stuck on a ship with a magical ex-pilot and tailing a bunch of space pirates -- we picked up three crews, didn’t I tell you? Friends of the family. So, you know. And a traumatized kid, too, that’s always fun.”

A traumatized adult as well, Steve thinks, the morbidity of his own internal monologue pressing into his esophagus. More than one, in fact. 

“How about the others?”

Tony exhales, slumps a little in his seat. 

“Not bad. Not terrible. Been worst.” He brings a hand up, waves it, puts it back down. “Coping, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean nowadays.” He shrugs, grimaces. “No more explosions, which is nice. Thor’s teaching us new guys how to speak tree.”

Steve remembers the tree. He was glad to have him back -- seemed like a good kid. Certainly made the rest of the spacers happy when he re-materialized.

“Could be worst,” Tony repeats, shrugging and then rubbing at his brows with stiff fingers. “We sort’ve. Get along, at least. Good music on this tin can. Quill’s gone quiet, but -- you know.”

Steve’s throat works. 

“Yeah.”

“He’ll be okay,” Tony says, like he’s trying to convince himself. They got word from Pepper less than a day After, and something in Steve is profoundly grateful for that. He’s not sure what would have happened if they -- hadn’t.

Steve exhales, rubs at a callous on his thumb. He’d gone to see Wanda, earlier, because waiting had been getting suffocating, because Nat told him to, because she was  _ too _ young. Like Steve was in any way a person that could help her, but he had to try. 

They’d buried him, the greyed body, and everyone else had appeared back where they disappeared. 

She still smiles, though. At him, at Nat, at Sam, because they’re what she has left. Steve wonders how she does it. He doesn’t think he could.

“It’s good to be talking again, Tony.”

Tony blinks, swallows. The holoscreen shakes a little.

“Yeah -- yeah. You too.”

**

He goes with T’Challa to meet the ships when they arrive, a group of Dora flanking the king with General Okoye at the forefront, loathe to let him out of her sight for even a moment. Steve, shoulder to shoulder with Bucky and Sam, cannot say he blames her.

Maybe that means he’s grown, he thinks, as the  _ Benatar’s _ hatch opens. In these past five days. Not a lot of time for growth, but everything feels accelerated and held back at the same time recently.

Maybe it’s an aftereffect of the stones.

The other ships are like nothing Steve’s seen before, large and flanked by guns, clearly battle-worn in a way that’s more haphazard than the tanks he remembers running alongside so many years ago. The people stepping out of them are somehow both more and less alien than Steve expects at the same time, markedly comfortable in their own skin as they make their way towards the common. Behind Steve, a crowd has gathered; scattered Jabari, Dora, and civilians who have become integrated into this, their last stand.

Steve feels that his melodrama is warranted, for all his inability to voice it out loud from sheer exhaustion. 

Carol Danvers is a tall woman, with cropped blonde hair and a kind face. He likes her immediately -- as if he has the luxury to like or dislike, because this is war in so many more ways than one -- and steps forward to shake hands. 

Her grip is firm, and her voice clear, if sad.

Hanging out with the crew who brought her home might do that to you, Steve thinks, watching as Tony walks down the hatch in a stumble that still retains three quarters of his old strut. He’s still limping, but it’s almost faded by now. Steve excuses himself, steps around Captain Marvel and pulls his old friend into a hug that he’s pretty sure neither of them feel like they deserve.

“Yeah, yeah, okay, Rogers.”

“C’mon,” Steve says. “It’s the end of the world.”

And it is, it really is, Steve thinks, because he releases Tony to look up and his eyes scan over the kid, hovering at Tony’s elbow, to catch the emerging Guardians. Half of them are bickering among themselves with a spindly looking man with tattoos covering his neck, but Quill’s frozen in place on the grassy Wakandan ground.

They’re standing close enough that Steve hears the gravelly, breathed-out, “Oh, thank fuck,” so utterly out of place but somehow exactly right in a way Steve can’t quite figure out until someone moves past him with a grace that he remembers from Shuri’s lab and time stands still for a moment. 

For all her mix of brittleness and tight looks, there’s something about the way her colourful hair streams out behind her as she runs that makes time stop, makes the whole crowd look. 

A minute later and Quill’s buried his face into the alien curls, skin pale, knuckles white as they grip at each other with all they have left.

The relieved noises that slowly build in the background of the tableau swell like the roar right before a shell hits the ground, and Steve finds he can’t help but laugh -- a near hysteric breath of a thing -- when the embrace turns into a dog-pile of a hug, the rest of the Guardians slamming into the two of them with an absurd amount of force. Tony looks relieved, left arm trembling a little, but Parker’s grinning, too big and full for what this is. He can hear T’Challa’s exhale from where he stands greeting Danvers. 

Wanda’s eyes are filled with tears, but the poor kid is smiling too, bigger than Steve thought possible.

The dog-pile shifts, and Tony says,

“So, now that we’re marginally less depressed, who’s craving a cheeseburger?”

At the center of the embrace, neither of them are crying, Steve notices.

He finds he understands.

**

“You should have told me who you were,” he says, knowing full well that she had no reason to believe it would mean anything to him.

Gamora regards him over her cup. 

“Would it have made a difference?”

The waiting would have still been a thing. So no, no difference. Maybe a different conversation over comm call. Alleviated Tony’s survivor’s guilt, or something.

If that’s entirely possible -- Steve’s not sure.

She’s sitting at the war room table, and it’s early enough in the morning that T’Challa called for coffee. The good kind, Sam says, knowing full well Steve doesn’t mind the difference. She’s changed her clothes; it’s odd to see her in a soft sweater and leggings. Odder still that the sweater is orange, and obviously oversized, and emblazoned with something that looks like the logo for a night club in a language Steve could not decipher given years.

By her hand lays a thin silver cylinder, clean and plain but with near-invisible carvings along its edge. He’s seen it, he realizes, before -- hanging from Quill’s belt before the group of them left. He remembers suddenly, thinking before that she was a warrior without a weapon.

She rubs her thumb against the curve of her clay coffee cup. 

Her words make it sound like she’d thought this through, thought ahead. That she was waiting with purpose.

“I’m glad,” Steve says. “That you found them, I mean. You were here to find your family, and you did.”

Gamora inclines her head; her eyes are sharp even as the curtain of her hair fraims her face. When she speaks, there is a rasp to her voice that he knows is characteristic, a blazing steel in her eyes that makes Steve think without a doubt that they’re going to win.

“Thank you, Captain Rogers,” she says, “but I am here to fight.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1) i figured gamora would get off vormir and find a ship once she comes back bc she's a resourceful icon like that, but i also figured that for Drama Purposes her ship would locate the benatar and then flake out on her before telling her that the benatar actually left earth  
> 2) i'm also rolling with the assumption that everyone who meets in the soul realm doesn't actually fully remember each other when they get back, nor remember exactly what happened, save gamora, who has a particular level of control bc she was the sacrifice that made the stone's use possible  
> 3) all the plot allusions for Avengers 4 are PURE nonsensical speculation and have zero (0) merit, so pls dont ask me whats going on. i dont know. i just wanted to write third person outsider pov starmora reunions & explore steve and gamoras potential friendship  
> 4) _usisi_ means "sister" in xhosa and i cross-checked it a billion times but if i used it wrong please don't hesitate to tell me
> 
> thanks for reading & i hope u enjoyed!!


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